A human network refers to a virtual network consisting of individuals, who have become acquaintances through social interactions, as units. An acquaintanceship refers to a relationship between persons who trust each other to a predetermined degree since information, experiences, and ideas are shared within a predetermined range and the sense of belonging to the same community is shared to a predetermined degree. According to typical social lives, such acquaintanceships may derive from preceding acquaintances, may rely on family ties, school relationships, or regional relationships, or may be created by close personal ties acquired through belonging to a specific organization or during collaboration in a company or team.
Recently, due to the development and distribution of networks, such as the Internet, online acquaintances can be acquired and maintained. A range of various types of servicing technologies for supporting users to actively construct human networks on-line have been proposed, forming databases using constructed human networks, based on which users can search for persons having focused abilities, careers, and the like, create online human network relationships with new acquaintances, or further extend their own human networks based on such relationships, and allowing users to share a variety of files or types of information.
The development of human networks has significantly changed the manner of human communications. According to traditional communications methods of the past, people met in person to talk with each other or communicated via mail. In contrast, online human networks, such as mini-homepages, blogs, and message boards, allow people to communicate with remote counterparts in very short periods of time and close acquaintances or people having similar interests to talk about or share contents in virtual spaces.
Recently, members of an extended family often live separated from each other due to the tread toward nuclear families, or family members often live separated from each other due to education or business. In addition, lovers or close friends are tending to create bonds by sharing favored contents on-line. Furthermore, due to the significant growth of the entertainment market, the trend of having the items of favored entertainers is growing.